Night Work

“That madwoman! You must do something about her. This is America—she has no right to torment my family. I will buy a gun to protect my wife and children! You have to make her stop.”

Kate put a hand on his arm, which surprised him into sudden silence. Wondering vaguely if she’d violated some cultural taboo, she removed her hand and used it to gesture toward the man’s study. “Shall we talk, Mr. Mehta?” she asked in a calm voice, and when they were all settled, she took out her notebook, although she doubted she would be writing anything in it—or if she did, that she would be able to decipher it in the morning.

“Now, Mr. Mehta, can you tell us what this is about?”

“She threatened me, my family.”

“Who threatened you?”

“That Hall woman who calls herself a minister and her minion, the—what is the word?—dyke who led little Pramilla astray. Amanda something, and some other woman, and my God, the press! But mostly the Hall woman. She said she would burn us as little Pramilla was burned.” It was “little Pramilla” now, Kate noted, not “the girl.” The belated affection soured her stomach even further.

“That’s a very serious charge, Mr. Mehta,” Al said.

“It was in the newspaper. They did not name her, but it was what the voice told me on the telephone, that she would do to us what happened to Pramilla. Look,” he demanded, “I have lost my sister-in-law, and then my own brother. Killed by those—those harridans, I have no doubt. Do I need to arm myself—or even take my whole family back to India, to escape their wrath? You must protect us.”

It was difficult to separate Mehta’s honest distress from his dramatic excesses and the unfortunate humor his increasingly singsong accent brought along; still, they had no choice but to take him at face value, at least for the moment. Kate asked if she could borrow his telephone to make the necessary arrangements.

“We’ll have the house watched tonight and during the day tomorrow. Ms. Hall is due to speak with the press in the morning, but I’ll see if we can reach her before then, ask her to tone down her remarks until we’ve had a chance to look into her accusations. Now,” Kate said firmly, holding her hand up to stem his protest, “we can’t stop her from speaking to reporters, any more than we tried to stop you. If I try to force her, it will only make matters worse.” Mehta subsided, grumbling to himself at the innate unfairness of the American system, protecting the criminals and leaving a man to protect his family alone.

Kate felt suddenly flattened by exhaustion, and she snapped, “Mr. Mehta, we’ve just spent a very long day cleaning up after a bunch of vigilantes who thought the same thing. If we hear you’ve gone out and bought a gun, I for one am going to be really unhappy.”

“No, no, I did not mean that. I do not want a gun—what do I know of guns but that children find them and shoot each other? I will let your officer do his work, and hope only that you will talk some sense into the madwoman.”

Kate winced at the description of a woman she still thought of as a friend, but she didn’t argue with it. She didn’t want to argue with anyone else, wanted only to tumble over onto Mehta’s sofa and pass out, but she had to stay rational until they could turn him over to the uniformed officer.

While Al and Mehta walked around the house and checked the doors and windows, Kate used Mehta’s phone a second time to call the hospital. Carla was out of surgery, her condition critical but stable, whatever that meant. She hung up and wandered around the office, suspecting that if she sat down she’d fall asleep. The books on Mehta’s shelves looked unread, there because a man’s study needed a lot of hardcover spines. Many of them were in some squiggly alphabet, and some of them were on India and Indian art. That reminded Kate of a question she’d carried around for days now, so when Mehta came back she asked him.

“Does your family…” How did one ask this? Kate wondered. “Do you worship the goddess Kali, Mr. Mehta?”

“Of course not,” he said, sounding affronted. “Only the… lower castes worship Kali. And tribals.”

The outcasts and the marginalized. The invisible ones again.

“Well, do you know anything about her worship?”

“Only in general. I have never been to one of her temples, if that’s what you mean, never witnessed a sacrifice.”

“Sacrifice? What, like animals?”

“Goats most usually, smaller animals and birds for the poorer people.”

“Do you by any chance know if they’re strangled?”

“What, the animals?” Mehta said, his voice rising in protest at the question.

“Yes, the goats and such.”

He took a deep breath, and said primly, “I believe their throats are cut.

“But I thought Hindus were vegetarians?”

“They don’t eat the animals.” Mehta was now frankly appalled, even more offended than he had been at the idea of his family worshiping this dark goddess. Kate just looked at him, wondering if his answers would have made sense if she weren’t so damned groggy, and then doggedly backtracked to where she had begun.

“I just asked about her worship because I was wondering if candy was a usual offering to Kali.”

“Candy?”

She was beginning to regret that she’d asked. “Yes, pieces of candy. Chocolate, hard sweets, that kind of thing.”

“I have never heard of that, although I suppose one could offer anything to a god, and foodstuffs are commonly used. Ghee—melted butter—is often used to anoint… objects of spiritual energy. But I have never heard of pieces of candy.” Kate started to tell him thanks and it was not important, but he was not through. “Now if you’d asked me about Candi,” he said, giving it a different pronunciation, “that I could help you with. Candi is another name for the goddess Kali, what you might call another manifestation of the primary goddess Durga. Hindu mythology is a little complicated,” he said, sounding apologetic.

“Yes,” murmured Kate. “So I understand.”

“Do Indians eat candy, Mr. Mehta?” Al asked.

Mehta looked puzzled at this bizarre conversation, but he answered readily enough. “Yes, we eat candy—at least, the children do, when their mother lets them. In India there is little chocolate, because of the heat, you know, but we have many sweetmeats made from milk and nuts, and using fruits and vegetables. Very rich, but actually not bad for you. Would you like to try some? My wife buys it in Berkeley.”

Kate would have demurred, but Hawkin said yes, he would be interested, and there seemed to be nothing else to do while they waited for the patrol officer, so Mehta, polite if uncomprehending, led them back to the kitchen and took out several clear plastic deli boxes filled with soft squares, white, orange, and a bilious pink color.

“Burfi,” he said, offering them a square of mealy and cloyingly sweet white stuff that tasted like perfume. “Carrot halwa, and almond burfi. And there are also gulab jaman and jelabis, which my wife makes sometimes, but I would call those desserts or pastries, not candy.”

Kate was having trouble with the substance in her mouth, but Hawkin swallowed hard and said thickly, “What about those little assorted seeds and stuff?”

“Seeds? You mean saumf? Not candy, no. You might call it a snack, I suppose, though I’d say it’s more a breath freshener.” He rummaged through another shelf and came out with a packet of loose seed mix with colored specks, apparently identical to the little bag of seeds Laxman had carried in his pocket. “Americans don’t tend to chew things, other than gum, but we chew betal, which makes one spit, or saumf, which doesn’t. Chewing or not chewing is a cultural difference.”

“But it’s not candy?”

“Not by any stretch of the imagination, Inspector.”

Their strange questions had woken his curiosity, but they did not choose to enlighten him. The patrolman arrived a minute later, and they left, reassuring Mehta, hit by a sudden return of anxiety, that they would do their best to deflect Roz Hall. They turned the house over to the uniform and settled into their car, with Hawkin behind the wheel.

Kate, oddly, felt less tired than she had. That burfi or whatever it was had been sweet enough to raise the blood sugar of a corpse; maybe the department should lay in a supply for those long